A service that exists to let people broadcast their physical location has, fittingly enough, begun operating in a few more spots. There's word today that Facebook Places now works in Brazil, Bulgaria, Egypt, India, Israel, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Africa. Facebook Places only crossed the Atlantic for the first time in September, rolling out in the UK, so the latest expansion makes for a quick - and impressive - continuation. Assuming nothing goes wrong,

People have compared Twitter in Facebook in many ways over the years, and now, it looks like one more similarity between the two companies might soon exist. Rumor has it Twitter will take over some offices Facebook used to occupy in New York. New York Observer reporter Laura Kusisto wrote late yesterday, "The little blue bird has been perching in a spartan temporary New York City space since September, searching for the perfect spot for its first New York City headquarters.

One way or another, it's sounding increasingly likely that Delicious will wind up with a new owner. After a rumor suggested last week that Yahoo had sold the property for $5 million, a report's now claimed that Yahoo is about to sell Delicious for perhaps 30 percent of that sum. Jay Yarow , the author of the fresh report, wrote, "Yahoo is about to close a deal to sell bookmarking site Delicious for $1-$2 million, says a source familiar with the discussions." Then,

Companies that sell stuff online may have a rather profitable stretch of years ahead of them if a new forecast from eMarketer is to be believed. eMarketer thinks U.S. retail ecommerce sales will climb at healthy rates through at least 2015. The graph below shows the exact figures. It seems the industry should see a 13.7 percent rise this year compared to last, and although things will slow down over time, a whopping 43.

With respect to the online video industry, new data from comScore indicates that February was an eventful month. Sites gained and lost millions of unique visitors, causing the top ten list of online video properties to change in significant ways compared to January. Google's sites are of course still at the top of the list; it would take changes involving tens of millions of people to cost the search giant its lead. But the company's unique viewer count did drop from 144.

Today, people all over the world have donned green clothing, cued up Celtic music, and resolved to drink Guinness in celebration of St. Patrick's Day. They've also conducted lots of searches related to the holiday, and Yahoo provided some interesting stats on the matter earlier this morning. One quick note first: of the three major search engines, Bing is the only one featuring an Irish theme or logo today.

The company that supposedly turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google may now plan to one-up it in another way. A new report indicates Groupon is discussing an initial public offering that could value the organization at $25 billion, even though Google's own IPO valued it at closer to $23 billion. We should note that $25 billion isn't the only figure being tossed around. A wide range of totals is apparently on the table.

Nonprofit organizations that are open to the idea of adopting new software and IT solutions may want to get in touch with Google. This afternoon, the search giant announced a program called Google for Nonprofits, and it's designed to help charitable groups save money and reach more people. For the cynics out there: yes, this also happens to serve as a push to increase usage of Google's products and services.

One month before The Social Network lost to The King's Speech at the Oscars, it seems that a category of sites led by Facebook pulled off a big )and arguably related( victory in the UK. Experian Hitwise indicated today that "Social Media" passed "Entertainment" in terms of visits. You can see some of the data for yourself below. Or if you'd prefer to deal in absolute numbers rather than percentages,

Internet Explorer 9, the newest )finalized( Web browser around, may not have much time left in which to enjoy that title. Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has indicated that Firefox 4 will launch on March 22nd barring any problems. We'd caution everyone not to get their hopes up too high. In January, Sicore predicted that a launch would occur before the end of February, so delays have been known to occur. Plus,

The likelihood of a Twitter user losing control of his or her account should soon decrease by quite a bit. Late yesterday, the company announced a new "Always use HTTPS" setting that's designed to give everyone an obvious way of playing it safe. A post on the Twitter Blog explained, "For some time, users have been able to use Twitter via HTTPS by going to https://twitter.com. We've made it simpler for users to do this by adding the option to always use HTTPS.

Google's interest in professional-quality video continues to rise. This afternoon, a company called Green Parrot Pictures announced that Google's followed up a recent series of moves in the space by acquiring it. Google appears to have big plans for the smaller company, too. To first provide a little background info: Green Parrot Pictures was founded in 2004 and is based in Ireland. It deals in making images and videos look better,

We waited to bring this story to you just in case the stock recovered )or took an even steeper dive( before the end of the trading day. But U.S. markets are now closed, meaning we can report that Yahoo's stock fell exactly 5.66 percent today. In fairness to Yahoo, almost everything with a ticker symbol suffered some damage over the past seven or so hours, as, after making up a lot of ground, the Dow and the Nasdaq still closed down 1.15 percent and 1.25 percent,

Smartphones may be omnipresent in college classrooms and certain offices, but the reality is that many, many people still own more basic devices. So LinkedIn, which used to take some pride in the fact that the average member's income was around $100,000, today unveiled a new app designed to work with feature phones. The app was built by Snaptu, and should be pretty flexible in terms of compatibility - it's supposed to work more than 2,500 types of phones.

Counterfeit goods tend not to make anyone happy in the long run. Buyers are frustrated when logos rub off and products fall apart. Manufacturers don't like the cheap competition. And organizations that help connect the two come under fire from both sides. So today, Google's taking steps to deal with counterfeiters who use its services. A Google executive made three promises this morning on the European Public Policy Blog. First, Kent Walker,

The idea of waving your phone around to pay for something may come one step closer to widespread, in-the-U.S. reality this summer thanks to Google. Rumors indicate the search giant intends to test a mobile payment service in New York and San Francisco. If true, this move would represent a sort of natural advance for the company. Google already made sure that Gingerbread and the Nexus S support near field communication )NFC( tech,

One of Yahoo's strongest properties will soon lose its head of product. Late yesterday, Matthew Rothenberg announced that he's leaving Flickr after working at the organization for about five years. To head off speculation, this move doesn't necessarily relate to Yahoo's decline or any planned changes at Twitter. Rothenberg wrote in a blog post , "Against all odds )and in the oddest of places(,

Five years and one week ago, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey sent the first ever tweet: "inviting coworkers." Now, to celebrate the occasion, Twitter has shared some stats about what's occurred since then, and the growth rate is extremely impressive in almost every respect. Twitter's Carolyn Penner posted the data on the Twitter Blog , and she began by talking about the rate at which tweets are sent. Apparently it took three years, two months,

Google's often made a big deal about using automated solutions to handle problems. The search giant hasn't tried to address every single Google bomb individually, for example; it's preferred to make algorithm changes that can tackle lots of weaknesses at once. Only now an admission related to whitelists is getting some attention. At SMX West,

Google's famous for the rate at which it gobbles up smaller companies, and soon enough, Facebook may adopt similar habits. Facebook now has an excellent deal broker onboard, anyway, as it's hired Amin Zoufonoun, Google's )former( director of corporate development. Zoufonoun was a longtime Google employee, with his LinkedIn profile indicating that he started in 2003. That fact means Google almost certainly didn't want to see him go,